He Who Controls the Present Controls the Past…

…and, George Orwell said, he who controls the past controls the future. These days, the global warming alarmists are firmly in control of the past–the records relating to the past, anyway–and one of the most egregious aspects of the global warming scandal is the fact that they consistently alter past temperature records to make the present look warmer by comparison. Today another example of this deception comes from Watts Up With That.

This is the way the U.S. Historical Climatology Network currently shows historical data for Central Park in New York during the month of July:

The surprise (when I plotted the source data myself rather than use NCDC’s tool) was how flat it was in the dust bowl heat of the 1930s. I know that on the NWS NYC web site, they have archived raw monthly means back well into the 1800s. So I downloaded that and compared.

Hmm again. Note that the temperatures that were actually recorded in Central Park were significantly warmer during the 1930s than the “adjusted” figures that are being reported today. This chart shows by how many degrees past temperatures are being adjusted, upward or downward, in the historical reporting that is now being done by alarmist agencies:

Note that zero–no adjustment–is near the top of the Y-axis. Almost all past temperatures have been adjusted downward, compared with the temperatures that were actually recorded at the time. During the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, when many record high temperatures were recorded, the readings have been adjusted downward by, generally speaking, one to one and a half degrees. These adjustments stop abruptly in the late 1990s. The effect of the adjustments is to make the past look cooler in relation to the present.

This kind of manipulation of data, changing the historical record after the fact, is done ALL THE TIME by the climate alarmists who crank out all of the data that are reported on in the newspapers. And the adjustments are always the same: they make the past cooler, so that the present will look warmer, in order to support their power-grabbing climate hysteria agenda. Whenever you hear on the radio that a temperature reading is the “warmest ever” in a particular place, you can reasonably assume that the “warmest ever” title was conferred by falsely reporting temperature readings from past decades.

This is, in my view, the biggest scandal in the history of science. I can’t think of any competitor that could even come close.